China Killed Your Dog. Are You Next?

By Adam Minter -
Oct 24, 2013

Has your dog exhibited
unpleasant health effects -- such as, oh, death --
after eating jerky treats imported from China? If so,
the U.S. Food & Drug Administration would really “like
to hear from you or your veterinarian.”

That, in essence, is the white flag of surrender
the FDA raised on its homepage this week, effectively
conceding its inability to figure out what, precisely,
in imported jerky treats has sickened 3,600 dogs and 10
cats since 2007. According to the agency, approximately
580 of those cats and dogs have died from causes that
include kidney failure and gastrointestinal bleeding.

Yet, despite the fact that the agency has tested
more than 1,200 jerky treats since 2011, visited
Chinese pet food plants and engaged in collaborations
across governments and academia, there’s no reason to
believe that the agency’s regulators are any closer to
understanding the outbreak than they were six years
ago. So, left to their own devices, they’re asking for
help from the public.

This should worry more than pet owners. According
to U.S. government data collected by Food & Water Watch,
a nongovernmental group concerned with food safety
issues, U.S. imports of Chinese food products for human
consumption have increased from 2.3 billion tons in
2003 to 4.1 billion tons in 2012. In effect, Americans
would be well within their rights to wonder: If the
agency can’t secure the jerky treats, what guarantee is
there it can secure the 367.2 million gallons of
Chinese apple juice Americans imported in 2012?

China’s food safety issues are well-documented,
stomach-churning, and -- justifiably -- the source of
intense popular anger at the Communist Party and its
food safety regulators (or lack thereof). In just the
last few weeks, alone, Chinese consumers have had the
misfortune to learn that cooking oil is sometimes made
from the “skins and buttocks of chickens and ducks,”
according to Xinhua, the state newswire, that much of
the beef jerky in Fujian Province is actually
chemically treated pork and that Air China, the
nation’s signature airline, allegedly served expired
food that sickened 30 passengers on an Oct. 6 flight.
What unites these and most Chinese food safety scandals
is fraud, especially in the sourcing and labeling of
food.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the FDA’s
sole tangible lead in the hunt for the source of the
jerky-related illnesses is fraud-related. According to
the agency’s Tuesday notice, its regulators, while
inspecting Chinese pet food manufacturers, found that
“one firm used falsified receiving documents for
glycerin, a jerky ingredient.” No details are given on
what, if any, effects the falsification of glycerin (if
that’s what happened) may have had, but the notice does
report that Chinese authorities informed the FDA that
they’d “seized products at the firm and suspended its
exports.” Was the FDA able to verify that claim? The
statement doesn’t say. Is the FDA in a position to
ensure that such falsification doesn’t happen again?
The answer to the question is an obvious no, but it’s
worth asking, nonetheless.

After all, in late August, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture’s Food Safety & Inspection Service affirmed
that four Chinese poultry processors are “equivalent”
to those in the U.S. and thus suitable to export cooked
chicken to the American market (the raw chicken,
however, must be imported from the U.S. or Canada). No
plants are exporting chicken, yet, but if and when they
do, it will happen with only periodic inspections by
American regulators.

Certainly, Chinese factories will have an economic
incentive to send safe chicken back to the U.S. But if,
one day, some of those chickens cause human illness, is
there any reason to believe that American regulators
will be able to find the cause? Based on the fruitless
six-year search for the source of jerky-treat illness,
the answer is surely no.

(Adam Minter is the Shanghai correspondent for the
World View blog and a contributor to the
Ticker. Follow him on Twitter.)